Pop on some headphones and take some time to explore. This is pretty much every musical genre I’ve ever encountered.
For most (but not all) genres, a click on the name will play a short snippet example. Click on the arrow to the right of the name and you’ll go to that genre’s page, with a pretty significant listing of artists in that space.
Click on an artist, you’ll hear a snippet. Click on the arrow to the right of the artist, you’ll go to that artist’s Spotify page.
From the footnote:
This is an ongoing attempt at an algorithmically-generated, readability-adjusted scatter-plot of the musical genre-space, based on data tracked and analyzed for 1536 genres by Spotify. The calibration is fuzzy, but in general down is more organic, up is more mechanical and electric; left is denser and more atmospheric, right is spikier and bouncier.
And (my favorite):
Be calmly aware that this may periodically expand, contract or combust.
I absolutely loved playing with this. Was thinking, I wish Apple Music offered me a system like this for music discovery. I know there are apps that do this, but none has access to my “For You” data. I’d love to spend some time in a tree like this, personalizing and improving my “For You” model so Apple Music actually has a true sense of what I like.
Fun, but I disagree with some of the artists in the jazz genres, and the samples picked. For example the bebop is clearly a jazz standard. The Cannonball Adderly quintet is listed as a big band. Probably coming down from the record labels. I hate the way they tag meta-data, which is one reason why I stopped subscribing to streaming services and just buy 1 album a month.
Sounds like you need Spotify. I’m interested in Apple music, but Spotify is so great I can’t get away from it, not even just to try. I can listen to genres, add music and every week I get a personal discovery list which algorithmically suggests songs, I just listen and add. So many new and interesting bands from around the world. I think this might be a matter of alorthim is better than curation, because it so expansive.
I have evrything Apple, but unlikely to ever leave Spotify.
Some genre-metadata inaccuracies aside, this is a very cool exploration tool.
The fella who created this wrote one of the greatest music review sites for over ten years: http://www.furia.com/page.cgi?type=twas Trigger warning: Marillion fan
Hell, I wish iTunes Store or Apple Music had … not-BS genre tagging.
Or at very least that it’d let me set a genre tag for something I’ve bought and remember it for redownloads.
(Because, no, this black metal is not “rock”, and this dark ambient is not usefully tagged as just “electronic”*, nor is this noise “alternative”.
I don’t want techno and house music when I’m looking for electronica or dark ambient or the like, and you’re wasting everyone’s time with what you have now, guys.
Likewise, I don’t want power metal or hair rock when I’m looking for black metal.
And I’m pretty sure, likewise, that people looking for techno or hair metal don’t want what I’m looking for.)
Yes, this is very cool.
Ehh. too many labels.. For me, music falls into 2 categories… Music I like, and music I don’t. All the other is just.. noise.
Absolutely. I might actually share some musical tastes with you, but definitely not all. Good luck finding an algorithm to parse those subtleties.
The best approximation I’ve found so far was Apple’s discarded attempts with their old “genius” recommendations, which I guess were sort-of crowd-sourced, and were actually very useful.
Apple Music discovery is far less on-point, at least for me.